Russia Adv – 1ac

University of Texas-Dallas 2011-12

Nuclear Propulsion Aff 7Wk Seniors – BBJFR

***Russia Adv

Russia Adv – 1ac

The US and Russia race to master nuclear satellite development but the US is backing out

Madrigal 2K9 – Visiting scholar at UC Berkley for the History of Science and Technology and senior editor of the Atlantic (Russia Leads Nuclear Space Race After U.S. Drops Out, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/nuclear-propulsion-in-space/) AS

The Russian space agency may build a nuclear-powered spacecraft with the blessing of the country’s leader, Russian and international media reported Thursday. The craft would cost $600 million and Russian scientists claim it could be ready as early as 2012. “The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep space exploration,” Andrei Ionin, an independent Moscow-based space expert, told Christian Science Monitor. Building a nuclear-powered spacecraft is feasible, said Patrick McDaniel, a nuclear engineer and co-director of the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, but probably not in the short time frame that the Russians have proposed. “To have a test article that they could test on the ground, that’s very reasonable,” McDaniel said. “To have a completed system, that’s highly unlikely.” If the spaceship actually gets built, it would complete a half-century quest to bring nuclear power to space propulsion, beginning with a 1947 report by North American Aviation to the Air Force. It’s not hard to see why engineers would want to use nuclear power. Fission reactors provide a lot of power for their size, which is a key attribute in designing space systems. One engineer claims nuclear rockets are inherently twice as efficient as their chemical brethren. Their attributes could have increased the exploration range of the space program, nuclear propulsion advocates argue, allowing us to get to more interesting places. “We could have done a lot more things in space. We could have gone more places,” McDaniel said of nuclear rocket research. “It’s highly likely we would have gone to Mars.” The current plans to potentially return to Mars do not include a nuclear rocket, but several decades of plans from the 1950s through the 1980s just assumed that nuclear power would be a part of the effort to reach the Red Planet. Toward that end, the Air Force, which preceded NASA in managing space programs, created Project Rover in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The goal of Rover was to develop a reactor that could be used for propulsion. Various incarnations of the reactor the scientists developed, called Kiwi, were tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada (see video). The idea behind the reactor was to use the heat generated by fission to heat hydrogen, which would expand, generating the force to push the rocket. None of the reactors ran for more than eight minutes, but they were considered to have met their goals. Technically, they worked. Though the exhaust from the rockets is radioactive, the first serious program to build a nuclear-powered rocket, Project Rover, enjoyed broad government support, even after it hit some cost overrun problems in the early 1960s. “Everyone likes Rover — the White House, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,”Time magazine wrote in 1962. “Senator [Clinton] Anderson insists that nuclear-powered rocketry is as important to U.S. security as the hydrogen bomb.” Beginning in July 1958, with the creation of NASA, work on nuclear rockets became the provenance of the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office. They began to consolidate the various programs, creating the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application program. Further reactor and nuclear rocket development occurred under NERVA. Several other reactors and rocket designs were tested, most successfully the Phoebus and XE-Prime. There were test failures, but the programs, overall, are considered technical successes. Beyond the nuclear rocket designs, the United States also launched a small nuclear reactor, SNAP10a, into space that generated electricity. It orbited for 43 days before a non-reactor-related technical failure shut it down. (See the video for an animated explanation of the project.)
The US is losing – recent loss of ISS control and Soyuz Reliance guts the US Space industry

Antonova 11 – editor of Russian life and physics org (Russia gains edge in space race as US shuttle bows out, http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-russia-gains-edge-space-shuttle.html) AS
The Russian space agency plays down any triumphalism, but US astronauts will remain dependent on Russia for access to the ISS at least until 2015 and will have to pay for seats in its Soyuz space capsules. "We cannot say that we have won the space race, but simply that we have reached the end of a certain stage," the deputy head of the Russian space agency, Vitaly Davydov, said in an interview. On July 8, four US astronauts will board the Atlantis shuttle for its last flight, wrapping up a three-decade-long programme in which the United States took turns to ferry supplies and crews to the ISS with Russia's Proton and Soyuz rockets. Henceforth, Washington will have to pay $51 million per seat in Russia's space capsules until a new crew vehicle can be built by private companies, which US space agency NASA has estimated could be between 2015 and 2020. Davydov of the space agency Roskosmos rejected any talk of rivalry, however, emphasizing that the ISS was primarily a story of successful international cooperation. "I cannot think today of another international space project that is so effective in its scale, its significance and its results as the ISS," he said. While Russia gains a symbolic victory, it will be a costly one, with the obligation to build more space ships to go back and forth to the ISS eating up a budget that could be spent on other projects. Unlike the reusable NASA shuttles, the Russian Soyuz space capsules are single-use, except for the section in which spacemen return to Earth. The situation is "not very convenient because it lays a heavy burden on Roskosmos's production capacities," space industry expert Igor Marinin told AFP. Roskosmos this year declared its budget as $3 billion, a fraction of NASA's massive $18.5 billion budget. And it has faced embarrassing setbacks, including the failure of several satellite launches that led to the sacking of the long-serving space chief Anatoly Perminov in April. The country's space industry has also drawn smirks with a clunky experiment simulating a trip to Mars, in which volunteers are spending more than a year confined at a Moscow research institute and "landed" in a specially designed sand pit. To recoup its costs, Roskosmos hopes to build a stronger presence in the commercial space market, such as satellite launches, its newly appointed chief Vladimir Popovkin said at the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum last month. "The goal is to take up a suitable position in the commercial market: about 10 to 12 percent" of a market worth $300 billion per year, Popovkin said. "This is one of the few things in our country that is competitive on the international level." While Russia holds 40 percent of the world's space launches and constructs 20 percent of its space craft, currently "its share in the space business is unfairly small, not more than three percent," Popovkin said Russia also faces new rivals, notably China, which in 2003 became the third country in the world after the Soviet Union and the United States to send a man into space in its own ship. In ambitious plans, China hopes to put a robot on the Moon in 2013 and to build its own space station due to enter service in 2015. Davydov acknowledged that China had become a rival, albeit still far behind, but said Russia did not feel threatened. "There is a place for everyone in space," he said. "In a certain sense, (China) is our competitor... but that is absolutely normal and we have not been afraid of the market for a long time now." Ironically, the new commercial realities of the Russian space programme, with reduced budgets and the need to cooperate on large-scale projects, make some Soviet space veterans yearn for the competitive edge of the Cold War. "It's strange that during the Cold War, when we cosmonauts and constructors dreamt of cooperation, there were a lot of new launches, but then cooperation came and now we are mostly repeating ourselves," lamented retired cosmonaut Georgy Grechko, 80. The US space shuttle programme's goal of making launches less expensive was not ultimately reached, he said, and its end sees a return to single-use "sausage-like" rockets little different to those used 50 years ago. "Mankind has lost its stimulus to go into space using more complicated machines," he complained.
ASRGs can win the race – Russia has the plutonium market cornered

Berger 2K9 – Staff writer for space news (Russia Withholding Plutonium NASA Needs for Deep Space Exploration, http://www.spacenews.com/civil/091211-russia-withholding-plutonium-needed-nasa.html) AS

WASHINGTON — Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA’s deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress’denial of President Barack Obama’s request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven years from the time funding is approved. U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a House Appropriations Committee member whose district is home to NASA’s planetary science-focused Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space News that Russia’s decision to withhold the promised plutonium is “certainly a concern” considering that the United States now will not be spending any money before 2011 to restart its own production. “Certainly, among other things, it would have helped our negotiating posture had funding been included and Russia could see that we were determined to move forward on our own,” Schiff said. NASA for decades has relied on plutonium-238 to fuel long-lasting spacecraft batteries known as radioisotope power systems that transform heat from the decaying plutonium into electricity. The Pluto-bound New Horizons probe was launched in 2006 with 11 kilograms of the material onboard, and the Mars Science Laboratory rover will carry 3.5 kilograms when it launches in late 2011. The United States stopped producing plutonium-238 in the late 1980s. While U.S. nuclear laboratories remain able to process and package the material for use in radioisotope power systems, the Department of Energy has been meeting NASA’s demand from a dwindling stockpile supplemented by periodic purchases from Russia’s shrinking supply. The Department of Energy would not say exactly how much plutonium-238 it has in inventory. But a National Research Council report released in May estimated that the amount available for NASA totals roughly 20 kilograms, about a fifth of which already has gone into the Mars Science Laboratory’s radioisotope power system. Radioisotope power systems are also used for unspecified national security purposes. The same report, “Radioisotope Power Systems: An Imperative for Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Space Exploration,” said NASA needs about 30 kilograms of plutonium-238 for three planetary probes planned for launch by 2020. The most plutonium-hungry of those is a multibillion-dollar mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The flagship-class Jupiter Europa Orbiter requires 24.6 kilograms of plutonium-238 for the five Multi Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (MMRTGs) that will generate 700 to 850 watts of electrical power during the orbiter’s anticipated 14 years of operations. Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, recently told scientists drafting the U.S. space agency’s next 10-year plan for robotic exploration of the solar system that the era of plutonium-powered missions could be coming to an end. He noted that not only had Congress denied Obama’s budget request for restarting plutonium-238 production, but that Russia’s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation informed the Department of Energy this fall that it will not fulfill a 5-kilogram order of plutonium-238 that was expected to be delivered in 2010. Rosatom also said it would not accept a pending 5-kilogram order for delivery in 2011. According to Green’s Nov. 16 presentation to the Planetary Science Decadal Survey steering group, the Energy Department expects that negotiating a new agreement could delay the next delivery of Russian plutonium-238 until after 2011. Jen Stutsman, an Energy Department spokeswoman, confirmed that the department was notified in mid-September that Russia does not intend to fulfill the terms of its current contract and wants to negotiate a new deal. She told Space News in a Dec. 9 e-mail that the department is working with other U.S. government agencies “to develop a coordinated position on the appropriate next steps.” Efforts to restart a domestic production capability, meanwhile, cannot proceed until Congress approves funding, she said. Green told Space News in an interview that NASA is moving ahead on the assumption that the Energy Department will come through with the needed plutonium. “We are marching down a course in good faith with the Department of Energy to negotiate with the Russians to procure the plutonium that would provide what we need to the plan that we proposed,” he said. Green said a one-year delay in the delivery of the Russian plutonium should not cause problems for NASA. If the first delivery is delayed much beyond 2011, however, mission schedules could suffer because U.S. labs need a few years to prepare, package and load the plutonium into a finished power system. “We will get to some point down the road where indeed the plutonium readiness will be on the critical path,” Green said. “Once things are on the critical path, they affect schedule.” Despite the uncertainty, NASA went ahead Dec. 7 with the release of a draft announcement of opportunity for Discovery 12, inviting planetary scientists to propose a $425 million mission that would launch by 2016 and utilize a NASA-furnished radioisotope power system. NASA also continues to work with scientists on a Jupiter Europa Orbiter instrument mix that assumes a 2020 launch of a spacecraft equipped with five fully fueled MMRTGs. Ralph McNutt, a planetary scientist who co-authored the National Research Council’s radioisotope power system report and serves on the decadal survey’s steering committee, said Russia’s actions underscore how important restarting U.S. production is to NASA’s planetary science plans. “If you don’t do it, we are done. We are out of business,” he said. NASA’s projected long-term requirements — which as of 2008 still included more than 50 kilograms for manned lunar missions planned through 2030 — far exceed what the United States can expect to buy from Russia. Still, NASA needs the undelivered Russian plutonium to keep its planetary science plans on track. Without it, the Europa mission would have to wait until U.S. labs are brought back on line and producing sufficient quantities to make up for the Russian shortfall — a seven-year process that McNutt said cannot be significantly shortened even if the United States is willing to spend considerably more than $150 million on the effort. “We’re talking about 10 times more money” to accelerate the process, McNutt said. Without more plutonium, the only way NASA could fly the Europa mission would be to switch to more efficient — but not yet flight-proven — Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generators (ASRGs). Like MMRTGs, Stirling systems convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. Where the two technologies differ is that the Stirling system has moving parts — vibrating pistons that make four times more efficient use of the rare and costly isotope. An ASRG-powered Europa orbiter, therefore, probably could get by on 6 kilograms of plutonium, according to McNutt. Several ASRG qualification units are undergoing longevity testing at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, and the company that built them, Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems, is gearing up to produce two flight units in time for the planned 2016 launch of Discovery 12. Each ASRG weighs less than 30 kilograms and is capable of producing 140 watts of electricity from 0.88 kilograms of plutonium. McNutt said most engineers would consider a 2016 flight demo way too late for NASA to prudently consider ASRGs for a Europa mission launching in 2020. Green agreed. “We are not going to risk a multibillion-dollar flagship on technologies unproven,” he said. “We have a path which we are walking down to flight qualify the [ASRG] and we need to walk that path.”

No Counterplans – Collapse of US-Russia Relations are inevitable

Fly and Schmitt 10 - * executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute **director of the Program of Advanced Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (Obama is making Bush’s Big mistake on Russia, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/22/obama_is_making_bush_s_big_mistake_on_russia) AS
Still in the midst of a diplomatic fracas with Israel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also found herself in a mini-crisis with Russia during last week's Moscow trip. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly snubbed Clinton during a meeting Friday, hectoring her in front of reporters after announcing Thursday that Russia would bring the nuclear reactor it is constructing in Iran online later this year. This comes just as Washington is hoping to tighten the screws on Tehran over its illicit nuclear program. Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev,reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin. Obama's focus on a personal relationship with a Russian leader is nothing new; in fact it's drearily consistent with how past U.S. presidents have handled their relations with Russia. After his first meeting with then-President Putin in June 2001, George W. Bush famously said: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul." But despite some early agreements between the two leaders that enabled the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and cooperate in Central Asia in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, by the end of Bush's second term relations with Russia had appreciably worsened and Russian democracy was in full retreat. Bush's focus on his personal relationship with the thuggish Putin was rightly scorned. But Bush was not the first American president to place a bet on personal ties between himself and a leader in Moscow. As the Soviet Union was coming to an end, George H. W. Bush clearly preferred doing business with its no-nonsense leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the disheveled, vodka-loving Boris Yeltsin. But Gorbachev's agenda was about saving the Soviet Union, while Yeltsin, for all his flaws, wanted to bury that corpse and move Russia toward the West and democratic rule. And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin. Medvedev, to be sure, talks a different game than Putin. On the domestic front, he has spoken and written extensively about the need to liberalize Russia's politics and economy, tackle corruption, and unwind the worst features of the autocratic and oligarchic system now in place. And it is on this basis that Obama's efforts to build a solid personal relationship with Medvedev can be justified. Or can they? For all his talk of reform -- and so far it is just that, talk -- Medvedev still claims that Russia is a working democracy that protects the liberties of individual Russians despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And on the national security front, it is difficult to see much light between Medvedev and Putin if Medvedev is judged by his actions, not just his rhetoric. Since becoming Putin's hand-picked successor as president in May 2008, Medvedev has done little to blunt his predecessor's Russian revanchist policies. On Medvedev's watch, Georgia has been invaded and Abkhazia and South Ossetia effectively annexed, and Russia has continued to threaten its neighbors and put forward a "new security architecture" whose obvious goal is to undermine NATO's role in Europe.
Perception of space dominance means Russia will resort to asymmetric warfare in space to defeat the US

Smith 11 – 1^st lieutenant Milstar Payload Engineer, 4th Space Operations Squadron and BA in Astronautical Engineering (Justin, The Age of Asymetric Warfare, http://www.schriever.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-070906-083.pdf)
This notion came to stark relief on 11 January 2007, when China successfully tested an antisatellite (ASAT) weapon on one of its own satellites.3 Suddenly, space assets which had operated without credible threats for years suddenly had become potential targets. This test did more than demonstrate the ability of a foreign power to destroy on-orbit systems; it may have very well ended the golden age of undisputed space supremacy that America has enjoyed since the Cold War, demanding change to current doctrine and revealing a critical vulnerability in the realm of asymmetric space warfare. Sun Tzu’s quote (below) reveals a very simple, yet important lesson. The US has developed a certain sense of inevitable complacency over its unchallenged superiority to date in space. The comfort with our current posture is a product of many influences, but one is particularly significant. Consider our only credible enemy in the history of space warfare, the former Soviet Union. Early on, the USSR sought to win the space race, intending to attain the ultimate high ground and use it as a force multiplier to accomplish its regional and global objectives. Both the US and USSR researched and tested ASAT capabilities to thwart the other, but soon abandoned the programs due to cost and an important strategic fact: if satellites are blown into numerous pieces, they then become a hazard for all other satellites in nearby orbits. The kinetic ASAT is a discriminate killer; the debris it creates is not. Thus in the Cold War, space was determined to be too valuable of an asset to be rendered useless to all parties by cluttering it with harmful satellite remnants. The US evolved and adapted to these unspoken rules of space warfare. America had won the last competition in space after a very rocky start and spent several unchallenged years building further dominance. How, then, could any new threat even begin to challenge? Space adds significant value to our nation’s defense by allowing seamless integration of the joint application of force projected globally on any adversary. This global reach defines not only a space capability, but a wartime philosophy. No other military has the capability to take a fight and deliver combat effects anywhere in the world as quickly and effectively as the US Space bolsters this capability by allowing the warfighter to master unfamiliar terrain, to coordinate attacks down to the second, to gather valuable intelligence, to put bombs within inches of a target, and much more. In a sense, it maximizes efficiency allowing a relatively small force to inflict an awesome amount of damage in a very short time. Although highly valuable to military applications, space is also important for commercial use. The commercially driven global telecommunications industry alone earned an estimated $1.21 trillion in revenue in 2005. By 2010, US investment in space is expected to be $500 - $600 billion— approximately equal to all current US investments in Europe.4 The global positioning system (GPS) provides all weather targeting capability, but also provides timing that allows automatic teller machines to work. Imaging satellites scout enemy positions, but also survey hurricane damage allowing relief efforts to be concentrated accordingly. Weather satellites project forecasts for both air strikes and weekend vacations. Television, communications, and global commerce in general—all depend on space. Whether analyzed from a commercial or military perspective, space is a cornerstone on which modern day living in this country depends. With such an invaluable role for commercial and military application, why isn’t everyone occupying the ultimate high ground? At present, space is an elite club with a cover fee that only few nations can afford. In a battlefield without borders, naturally limited access based on cost and technical complexity, then, is a defense of its own. With only a few nations with the financial and technical prowess to put a system on orbit, space is, at least for now, naturally fortified. Furthermore, once on station, destroying an enemy’s satellite is potentially a death sentence for friendly satellites in nearby orbits. These two facts have been the general concept of defense in this arena for years, but no longer appear to hold true.
Space is best asymmetrical advantage Russia has to defeat the United States in a nuclear war

Lewis 11 – Director of the Center for Defense Information (Possible Consequences for Crisis Scenarios, http://ccc-media.110mb.com/eBooks/What%20if%20Space%20Were%20Weaponized.pdf)
This is the first of two scenarios that consider how U.S. space weapons might create incentives for potential adversaries to behave in dangerous ways, including the possible impact of space weapons on what is already a delicate and compli-cated relationship among the three key nuclear weapons states, the United States, Russia and China. Space weapons are frightening to potential opponents — this presents both opportunities and dangers. On one hand, proponents of space weapons focus on the ability of such weapons to dis-suade potential opponents from developing certain military capabilities and deter them from threatening U.S. interests. Although space weapons may dissuade some states from investing in, for example, ballistic missiles, two states — Russia and China — are unlikely to get out of the business of nuclear deterrence. Both states are the subject of extensive nuclear war planning by the United States, despite political rhetoric from Washington about “moving beyond” the Cold War. Far from leaving behind such concerns, the most recent Nuclear Posture Review recom-mends sizing the U.S. nuclear forces for “immediate and unexpected contingencies.”³⁰ The NPR identifies China as “a country that could be involved in an immediate or potential contingency” and notes that “a contingency involving Russia, while plausible, is not expected.”³¹ The suite of space capabilities outlined in the scenario concerning the Taiwan Strait — long-range strike systems, ballistic missile defenses and space-based surveillance — are largely de-signed to target the nuclear forces of these two countries. Leaked portions of the NPR call for “systems capable of striking a wide range of targets throughout an adversary’s territory” includ-ing “long-range precision strike weapons and real-time intelligence systems” that are capable of tracking and destroying “mobile ballistic missiles.” ³² Cold Warriors have long desired the ability to hunt mobile ballistic missiles. The most difficult problem is time. It takes just minutes to launch a ballistic missile. If one wishes to destroy that ballistic missile before it launches. One must locate the target and continue to track it, while an aircraft moves within range of the target. During Operation Desert Storm, for example, the United States launched more than 1,500 sorties to hunt mobile Scud missiles — yet there is no evidence that any significant number of Scuds were destroyed.³³
And, loss of credibility means the US-Russia war goes nuclear

Gray, 05 – Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies, and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, at the University of Reading (Spring 2005, Colin S., Parameters, “How Has War Changed Since the End of the Cold War?” http://www.carlisle.army. mil/usawc/parameters/05spring/gray.htm)
6. Interstate War, Down but Far from Out Logically, the reverse side of the coin which proclaims a trend favoring political violence internal to states is the claim that interstate warfare is becoming, or has become, a historical curiosity. Steven Metz and Raymond Millen assure us that “most armed conflicts in coming decades are likely to be internal ones.”21 That is probably a safe prediction, though one might choose to be troubled by their prudent hedging with the qualifier “most.” Their plausible claim would look a little different in hindsight were it to prove true except for a mere one or two interstate nuclear conflicts, say between India and Pakistan, or North Korea and the United States and its allies. The same authors also offer the comforting judgment that “decisive war between major states is rapidly moving toward history’s dustbin.”22 It is an attractive claim; it is a shame that it is wrong. War, let alone “decisive war,” between major states currently is enjoying an off-season for one main reason: So extreme is the imbalance of military power in favor of the United States that potential rivals rule out policies that might lead to hostilities with the superpower. It is fashionable to argue that major interstate war is yesterday’s problem—recall that the yesterday in question is barely 15 years in the past—because now there is nothing to fight about and nothing to be gained by armed conflict. Would that those points were true; unfortunately they are not. The menace of major, if not necessarily decisive, interstate war will return to frighten us when great-power rivals feel able to challenge American hegemony. If you read Thucydides, or Donald Kagan, you will be reminded of the deadly and eternal influence of the triad of motives for war: “fear, honor, and interest.”23
Extinction

Bostrom 02 – Professor of Philosophy at oxford University (Nick March 2002, Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards, Journal of Evolution and Technology, p. http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)

A much greater existential risk emerged with the build-up of nuclear arsenals in the US and the USSR. An all-out nuclear war was a possibility with both a substantial probability and with consequences that might have been persistent enough to qualify as global and terminal. There was a real worry among those best acquainted with the information available at the time that a nuclear Armageddon would occur and that it might annihilate our species or permanently destroy human civilization.[4]  Russia and the US retain large nuclear arsenals that could be used in a future confrontation, either accidentally or deliberately. There is also a risk that other states may one day build up large nuclear arsenals. Note however that a smaller nuclear exchange, between India and Pakistan for instance, is not an existential risk, since it would not destroy or thwart humankind’s potential permanently. Such a war might however be a local terminal risk for the cities most likely to be targeted. Unfortunately, we shall see that nuclear Armageddon and comet or asteroid strikes are mere preludes to the existential risks that we will encounter in the 21st century.

US-Russia war is the only scenario for war

Umland 10, DAAD Lecturer, Shevchenko University, “The Unpopular Prospect of World War III…The 20^th Century is Not Over Yet,” HISTORY NEWS NETWORK, January 17, 2009, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/60004.html.
A regularly employed analyst runs a certain risk when publicly speaking about the possibility of a destruction of humanity, in the foreseeable future. “Professional myopia” or “immaturity in judgment” may be among the less denigrating – “unprofessional hysteria” or “irresponsible conduct” the more damning – reactions by colleagues. One workplace-friend recently advised me to delete from an article the term “World War III.” I decided not to do so. That is because the darkness of a future scenario that one comes to regard as possible should be no hindrance for its full assessment and public outline. Arguably, one of the reasons that societies afford themselves the employment of social scientists at universities and research institutes is the provision of information and interpretation that goes beyond what journalists, publicists or politicians – often, more dependent on current mainstream opinion and reigning political correctness than academics – may be able to say or write. A plain extrapolation of recent political developments in Russia into the future should lead one to regard outright war with NATO as a still improbable, yet again possible scenario. It is not unlikely that Russian public discourse will, during the coming years, continue to move in the same direction in, and with the same speed with, which it has been evolving since 2000. What is, in this case, in store for the world is not only a new “cold,” but also the possibility of a “hot” and, perhaps even, nuclear war. This assessment sounds not only apocalyptic, but also “unmodern,” if not anachronistic. Aren’t the real challenges of the 21st century global warming, financial regulation, the North-South divide, international migration etc.? Isn’t that enough to worry about, and should we distract ourselves from solving these real problems? Hasn’t the age of the East-West confrontation been over for several years now? Do we really want to go back to the nightmarish visions of the horrible 20th century? A sober look on Russia advises that we better do: Carefulness may decrease the probability that a worst-case scenario ever materializes. Such a scenario has become feasible again as Russian public opinion and elite discourse have – until August 2008, largely unnoticed in the West – made a fundamental shift, during the last years. The 1990s began with Russia’s enthusiastic embrace of the Western value system and partnership; they ended with Russian scepticism and bitterness towards the West. This was less the result of NATO’s expansion or bombing of Yugoslavia per se than an outcome of Moscow’s peculiar interpretation of these actions. In the early 1990s, Yeltsin had failed to remove many of the Soviet Union’s elites from their positions of power and influence. This gave the ancien régime’s representatives an opportunity to impregnate post-Soviet political discourse with a reformulated, yet again fundamentally dualistic world-view in which Russia and the US remain archenemies fighting not only for control of the former Russian empire, but also deciding the future fate of humanity. Initially marginal interpretations such as these were making inroads into Russian mainstream discourse in the 1990s already. With the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s rise in 1999, however, they started to slowly, but steadily move into the political center. So, even before the Russian-Georgian war, Russians’ views of the United States were deteriorating continuously. Whereas in a poll conducted by Russia’s leading sociological survey agency, the Levada Center, in July 2000, 69 percent of the respondents said that they had a “very good” or “mainly good” opinion of the United States, by July 2008 this number shrank to 43 percent. In the same period, the number of those with a negative or very negative view of the United States rose from 23 percent to 46 percent. Asked by the Levada Center what they saw as the major reason for the Russian-Georgian conflict, 48 percent of the respondents in mid-August 2008 chose the answer “The U.S. leadership wants to extend its influence on Russia’s neighbouring states.” To the question why leading politicians of the West support Georgia, 66 percent replied that it is because “Western politicians want to weaken Russia and push her out of the Caucasus.” In another poll in September 2008, 52 percent of the Russian respondents who knew the phrase “cold war,” agreed that it was continuing while only 18 percent of them chose the answer “The cold war is over.” Even more worrying has been the growth of anti-Americanism in Russia’s elite strata and intellectual discourse. Whereas Europe’s recent scepticism towards the US has been, in many cases, an anti-Bushism, the Russian aversion towards America and NATO goes much deeper. Today, the idea that the Western (or, at least, Anglosaxon) political leaders are deeply russophobic is a common place in both TV talks show and academic conferences. That events like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or Georgian attack on South Ossetia were fundamentally inspired, if not directly organized by the CIA is, in Russia today, a truism. That the CIA or another Western secret service is behind 9/11 or the Beslan tragedy are respected assessments frequently discussed in mainstream Moscow mass media. That the current behaviour of the West and its puppets in Eastern Europe has much in common with Nazi Germany’s policies is an opinion with which, today, many Russians would readily agree. Such collective paranoia is not only regrettable, but also dangerous. The nation that is beholden by these bizarre views has still a weapons arsenal large enough to erase humanity, several times. Until August 2008, it appeared that Dmitry Medvedev’s rise may usher in a new stage in Russian-Western relations – a chance that, after the Russian-Georgian war and the disciplining effect it had on the new President, has become slim again. Today, there is little ground for hope that the deep contamination of Russian public discourse could be reversed, or, at least, its further evolution be stopped, in the nearer future. The example of the Weimar Republic illustrates that a conspirological view of the world among the majority of a country's population might even prepare the ground for the rise of fascism. Moreover, in Russia, the West’s reputation has suffered not only, like in much of the world, from the various international escapades of the Bush administration and Blair cabinet. Reminding the Entente’s misguided behaviour towards Germany after World War I, the West has – through its usual arrogance as well as simple inattention – regularly ignored legitimate Russian interests in the former Soviet Union. In Georgia and Ukraine, the West left and is leaving largely uncommented frequently undemocratic policies of nationalizing regimes that were and are infringing the interests and feelings of national minorities, not the least of ethnic Russians. Scandalously, the EU has accepted as members the Baltic ethnocracies that have, to one degree or another, made their Russian-speaking populations hostages to former Soviet policies: The governments of Latvia and Estonia deny their large russophone minorities elementary political rights on the basis of dubious ethnocentric arguments long discredited in Western Europe. As there is little prospect that the West will develop the strength or even willingness to correct these and similar inconsistencies in its international behaviour, Moscow’s falcons will find it easy to further demonize the Western elites. The latter, in turn, will face an acrimonious choice to make when it comes to follow up on their promise, to Georgia and Ukraine, that these countries shall become members of NATO – an organization seen as fundamentally anti-Russian by both Moscow’s intellectuals and the Russian common man. Unless something fundamentally changes in Russian-Western relations, we will – as the Russian-Georgian war illustrated – continue to live on the brink of an armed confrontation between two nuclear super-powers.